A few weeks back Gee Hooks penned a good piece on why people are subscribing to relationship guidelines that don’t work for them. I commented on that post saying,

“I think it’s a certain type of person who thinks that they have to subscribe to the popular thought about relationships, marriages and good/bad significant others… it’s not even an issue of losing morals/values either. Quite frankly if you are still subscribing to that thought, you’re becoming an outdated individual. Nobody else is doing that anymore.”

I promised to expand on my thoughts in a subsequent post and then life happened but I hope to be able to return to relevance with this post today. In 2014, a year in which we are now more free as a society than we’ve ever been, you simply do not have to follow any relationship rules. (I admit that we are not 100% free and am not implying that we don’t have a long way to go.)

It may have been about ten years ago when I first had a conversation in a relationship forum about why men and women shouldn’t complain about their relationships. I had this theory that I would call the “you’re not going to break up with them, so shut up” theory. It was a pretty novel idea ten years ago and at the time I didn’t understand something about relationships. People have goals associated with their lives that involve relationships which make it a little hard to take the “break up with me or STFU” approach. That’s why later on in life I realized that in order to ever really be successful at relationships, we would have to be much more flexible with our demands. Regardless of the flexibility of our relationships, we must understand that doesn’t mean that we have to subscribe to any set of “relationship guidelines.”

In 2014, let’s look at where we stand socially as a people and let’s break it down by the way we categorize; demographically:

Race – Each year, interracial relationships and marriages increase. Careful… most people will marry intra-racially. Only about 10% of marriages are interracial but that number has been climbing higher and higher each year. This means that you don’t have to subscribe to any thought that you should date within in your race, you’re more than welcome to but that’s your choice.

Gender – Men and women are experiencing a shift in traditional roles in relationships. Your gender no longer determines your role. And if it does, there’s a large majority of people who don’t agree with relationships that have traditional gender roles. This means that if you think that being a man means that you can’t date until XYZ happens or that being a woman means that you have to do ABC, you’re probably wrong. People aren’t making gender decisions as much as they’re making preferential decisions in their relationships that transcend gender.